Is Actor and Comedian Jack Whitehall the Next Great British Import?

The Nutcracker and the Four Realms—the big, splashy live-action fairy tale that’s a sequel of sorts to Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker—arrives in theaters today, and with it, the English actor and comedian Jack Whitehall’s second appearance in a big-ticket Disney production, though you’d be forgiven for missing him the first time around. To be clear, you probably did see his first Disney film (a certain cinematic phenomenon by the name of Frozen; perhaps you’ve heard of it?), but you most certainly missed Whitehall. As he has hilariously recounted on the talk show circuit and in his Netflix special At Large, Whitehall’s role (a troll) in the animated film was downgraded to “non-speaking” in the editing suite. (To hear him tell it, you might say that he was iced out of Frozen.)

Lucky for him, this time around he managed to avoid the cutting-room floor. When I speak to Whitehall by phone, it’s the day after The Nutcracker’s Los Angeles premiere, and the actor was quite pleased to see that he’d made the final cut. “Fortunately I am in this one,” he says. “But, you know, I was very wary in the run-up. Just in case we had another Frozen situation on our hands, though I am not, I would say, a starring role.”

He’s right; Whitehall’s screen time is sparse compared to that of his costars Keira Knightley and Mackenzie Foy, who play the Sugar Plum Fairy and Clara, respectively, but his bumbling toy soldier still rises to the occasion when terror sets in on his fairy-tale realm. (And yes, his lines remain intact.) But while American Ballet Theatre’s principal dancer Misty Copeland dazzles filmgoers with her fancy footwork, she was one of the few balletic characters in the film—a disappointment for Whitehall, who says he wanted to show off his chops at the barre and beyond. “I went to see The Nutcracker at the National Ballet when I was a child, and I was quite into ballet,” he says. “My sister did ballet, and I used to join in on her classes until my father wickedly stopped me and made me do karate, which I hated.”

Born in Westminster, London (and according to him, frequently eclipsed by his prep school classmate Robert Pattinson in drama class), Whitehall enrolled at Oxford and later Manchester University before abandoning his studies a few months in so that he could jump straight into the stand-up tour circuit. He was soon finding himself ranked among the likes of famed British funnymen like James Corden and Jack Dee; in 2012 Whitehall was named that year’s King of Comedy at the British Comedy Awards. Countless shows, several BBC series (including a talk show with his father), and some big-screen adaptations (and appearances) later, and Whitehall found himself full throttle ahead with his career, and mourning the loss of his freewheeling adolescence. And so he did what most people already had done, only in rather reverse order: He took a gap year. But instead of setting off solo or with friends, he took along his 73-year-old (and very uptight) father, Michael, and a camera crew. The result? The docu-style travelogue series Jack Whitehall: Travels With My Father, which premiered in 2017, and just released its second season in late September.

The first season focused on the pair’s journey through Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, which had all the hallmarks of a classic gap year (hostels, Full Moon parties, cheap beer), only with Whitehall Sr. calling to mind something akin to a real-life, 21st-century, male iteration of Downtown Abbey’s Dowager Countess. (A sample of an admiring headline: “14 Times Jack Whitehall’s Dad Gave No Fucks.”) In the show’s second season (billed as a “cultural tour through Europe”), the father and son travel to Germany, Hungary, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, and Turkey by plane, train, and automobile. They maintain their ultra-dry, lightly antagonistic patter throughout: The Whitehalls go out on a sea kayak together, and then father throws his oar away so that son has to do all the paddling; they get matching tattoos; they make disparaging jokes; Whitehall Sr. picks up a Luk Thep doll in Thailand, names it Winston, and treats it to this day (at least on social media, where it has more than 56,000 followers) like his favorite son, much to his actual son’s chagrin.

So what’s next for Jack Whitehall? His father is still in the picture: Michael Whitehall’s memoir, Backing Into the Spotlight, was published in late October (Jack wrote the forward), and a third season of Travels With My Father awaits, destination unknown. “Nothing has been confirmed,” Whitehall says, “but my father has already vetoed a few places like India and Africa, so I don’t know where we’re going to get him to agree to.” Disney seems to think he’s got the stuff to conquer American audiences. Whitehall has recently been cast in yet another of the Hollywood mega-studio’s productions: Jungle Cruise, an adventure film based on a Disneyland’s theme park ride (à la Pirates of the Caribbean) starring Emily Blunt and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson that’s set to premiere in 2020. Whitehall’s casting made headlines when it was revealed that he would play Disney’s first-ever openly gay character (the role is Emily Blunt‘s character’s brother) a choice that raised some ire on social media in terms of the conversation around representationin Hollywood. (Whitehall does not identify as gay.)

These days the actor and comedian is keeping busy in London, frequenting the West End (“a lot of my friends are actors so it’s great to be able to support them”) and joining the stands at just about any sporting match, “even the sports I don’t fully understand, like all of the American ones.” Will he come to New York, I ask, offering to tour Winston around the Vogue offices? “No, no he doesn’t need a tour,” he says, “he needs to be hurled into the ocean.” Perhaps I should have asked his father?